


The End of the Line

by melissmallfic



Category: Shameless (US)
Genre: Action/Adventure, Blood and Violence, Captain America AU, Homophobic Language, M/M, Marvel Cinematic Universe AU, Slow Burn, Superheroes, superhero au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-18
Updated: 2016-02-15
Packaged: 2018-05-14 19:00:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 19,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5754619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melissmallfic/pseuds/melissmallfic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ian's left for the Army, and no one's heard from him in months. Mickey can't stop thinking about him, and is sure it only means bad news when the Army comes looking for him. But they have an offer, one that's impossible for him to refuse. It'll take him out of Chicago, but put him in more danger than he ever experience under Terry's reign. It may, however, lead him back to Ian.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. You didn’t take all the stupid with you

**Author's Note:**

> This is something of a Captain America AU. You don't really have to have seen the movies to understand what's happening. But I highly suggest it if you want to see a bunch of pretty boys saving the world and being totally in love with each other. :)
> 
> This is also very Mickey-centric, at least for the first half. So if you're looking for a lot of Ian, well...you're not going to find it yet.

“You seen Gallagher?” Mickey asks, playing nervously with the glass of whiskey in his hands. 

“Frank?” Kev asks, already smiling, expecting Mickey to have a good story for wanting to find him. 

Mickey shakes his head, regretting opening his mouth at all. But the floodgate’s open and he can’t stop the words from spilling out. “No, the other one. Redhead.”

Now Kev’s confused, but also wary. Mickey is well aware that Kev regards all the Gallaghers minus Frank as sibling-children, meant to be protected and complained about in equal measure. “Ian? He took off. Why, he owe you money or something?” The edge in his voice is barely detectable, but Mickey knows it’s there. Luckily, Kev’s distracted by a ringing phone and a conversation Mickey couldn’t care less about. 

That was hard, asking about Ian. Harder than he likes to admit anyway. He hates that he can’t say his name, has to refer to him in code or by a name he doesn’t call him anymore in his head. One of these days he’s going to start talking about something, the weather, the neighborhood, anything, and all that’s going to come out is Ian Ian Ian Ian Ian Ian Ian. 

He doesn’t stay too much longer at the Alibi, but long enough that he hopes Svetlana will be asleep when he gets home and his dad will have drunk himself into a coma. As soon as he steps inside the house he knows it’s not his lucky day, as he can hear Svetlana and Terry not only conscious but both in a lather about something in the kitchen.

His self-preservation instinct is telling him to just get the fuck out. Turn around and start running. But he has nowhere to go, something he tried and failed to make Ian understand when he was still around to argue with.

Swallowing and rolling his shoulders loose, he walks as casually as possible into the kitchen, straight to the fridge to pull out a beer. Even with his back turned he can feel his wife and his father both staring holes into the back of his head. He turns and twists off the top of the beer, leaning back against the closed door of the fridge. He takes a long swallow and looks back and forth between the last two people on earth he wants to share a room with.

“What?”

Svetlana’s scowl deepens and she shakes her head. He hears her mutter something in Russian under her breath, but he hasn’t picked up a single word since she moved in. He assumes it’s never anything good if it’s aimed in his direction.

Terry’s reaction is more unsettling. His face starts to turn red and his breathing picks up, his nostrils flaring and fists clenching. Mickey would point out the overkill, but he still values his life, even if the price is dropping every second.

“You forget to make a stop today?” His dad’s voice is ice cold and the effect is immediate, sending chills up Mickey’s spine. Fuck. He was supposed to visit one of his dad’s middle men, a worthless piece of shit who could never be trusted to hold onto cash for more than a few days. Last month the guy claimed he’d been robbed right before Iggy went to collect. Terry suspected he was saving up to make his own moves. It was Mickey’s job to get the money and put the fear of god in him this time. 

Mickey takes another swallow of beer to buy himself some time. “Was just gonna head over there.”

Terry stands up, taking the table with him. Svetlana reacts quickly, backing herself up against the wall closest to the door. In a second, Terry’s hand is around Mickey’s throat, sending his head back hard against the freezer. Mickey gasps and drops the beer bottle, feeling shards of glass and a splash of liquid against his pant leg. 

“You lazy fuckin’ faggot.” Terry brings his other hand up to Mickey’s throat and gave a sharp squeeze. Mickey desperately wants to bring his hands up to try to pry his father’s fingers off, but knows if he does they’ll only get tighter. He has some air, just enough to keep breathing for now anyway. “What was more important, huh?” Terry’s grip loosens, but only so that he can pull Mickey closer and slam him back against the freezer again.

Mickey’s vision goes black for a moment and he feels the whiskey and beer start to churn in his stomach. It’s been a while since his dad got physical like this. Since Svetlana moved in it’s been glancing blows in the hallway, tight hands on the back of his neck. This was old school shit and it was much worse than Mickey remembered. Even Svetlana looked nervous, though he knew it wasn’t out of concern for him, but for herself and the baby if he were to be removed as the primary target of Terry’s rage.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Mickey wheezes out, still keeping his hands pressed flat against the fridge. 

“Sorry,” Terry says quietly, bringing his face close to Mickey’s. “Do you have any idea how much money I lost today because of you?” Mickey shakes his head and tries to apologize again, insist that he’ll make it up, but Terry cuts off more of his air and he’s mute. “You think you’re sorry now. You don’t know what sorry is.”

The next slam against the fridge sends Mickey to the floor, where he manages to get one shaky breath in before a boot catches him in the stomach. He can’t look up, his head hurts too much, but he hears Terry telling Svetlana to stay where she is. Terry has a real thing about people learning lessons by watching him teach other people. Mickey loses any concept of time quickly and consciousness soon after. 

***

When he first wakes up, he’s gasping and crying, with no knowledge of where he is or what hurts the most. He’s only awake for a few minutes before a wrong turn sends a white hot flare of pain up his back, and he blacks out again.

The next time his eyes open, the pain is still there in full-force, but he’s on softer ground, maybe even his bed. A hand grabs him by the jaw roughly and forces his mouth open. He can taste the chalkiness of ibuprofen on his tongue and then a mouthful of water. He nearly chokes, but gets them all down before he’s out again.

The third time his eyes open he can stand to keep them that way, even though they’re barely slits. Terry must have been aiming for symmetry, because both eyes feel bruised and cut, his kidneys ache equally, and his two front teeth both feel loose against his tongue. 

The hand is back against his jaw, but this time he blocks it and struggles back. That’s when he notices that he’s naked and definitely in his own bedroom. He turns his head just enough to see the hand belongs to Svetlana, who’s got what must by a fist full of painkillers raised up next to her face. She watches him struggle to detangle his legs from the sheets and sit up against the headboard. Every movement is excruciating and he feels stomach acid burning its way up his throat more than once.

When he finally gets to a seated position, his breathing is ragged and he’s soaked in sweat. Svetlana curls her lip up in disgust. “You are sick again, I am not cleaning.”

He wonders how many times she had to clean up already, but rather than thank her he shakes his head slowly. “Not gonna be sick,” he rasps. He holds his hand out to her and she lets the pills drop into his palm. With glacial slowness, he brings them up to his mouth and lets them sit there, worried for a second that he lied about not being sick. After a few seconds he motions to her and she takes a glass of water off the nightstand and watches him drink it. He drinks it slowly, feeling the pills rattle down his throat and threaten to come back up. When they don’t, he drinks until he can’t stomach anymore and hands the glass back to her.

The whole ordeal leaves him drained and ready to go back to sleep. But the sound of Svetlana’s voice stops him right as he’s about to drift off.

“We cannot stay here.” 

He looks at her and there’s an expression he hasn’t seen since the first time he saw her, walking into the Milkovich house, unnerved and afraid by the sight of two broken boys in the living room. He hadn’t looked at her face much that day, but when he did he saw that she wasn’t stupid. She knew what kind of man she was dealing with.

None of that means that they have any options. He’s never been able to keep enough of his cut from jobs to save anything. And he’s only left the state for illegal purposes and to visit men associated with Terry. He has nowhere to go and nothing to get him there. If it didn’t hurt so much, he’d be laughing. Svetlana has a lot more in common with Ian than she thinks.


	2. The only question that matters

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some content warnings at the end!

Mickey has nowhere to go, but he’s smart enough to make himself scarce for awhile. And well-behaved. There isn’t a shakedown or collection that gets missed. He even stays on top of Iggy, even though he knows his brother doesn’t have a target on his back the way he does.

Svetlana gets bigger all of a sudden. He overhears Kev talking excitedly about how she’s popped, whatever the fuck that means. He’s a lot quieter at the bar, no more slips about Ian. There’s no evidence to suggest it, but Mickey feels like Terry has eyes and ears everywhere.

Tuesday night in the bar is pretty quiet, aside from the regulars nursing beers and complaining about whatever bullshit Mickey can’t be bothered to listen to. He clocks a guy he’s never seen in the back booth, but ignores the alarm bells that go off and takes a seat at the bar.

Kev sets a beer in front of him quickly, obviously grateful for something to do and some young blood. Mickey nods his thanks and flexes the fingers on his right hand, which are already bruising. “You got, like, frozen peas or some shit? Fuckin’ hurts.”

Frowning, Kev leans down to get a closer look at Mickey’s knuckles. “Think I might actually have an ice pack. EMTs left it behind last time Frank knocked himself out.” He disappears to the other end of the bar and Mickey feels the hairs on the back of his neck stand up, like someone’s watching him.

He takes a sip of beer and turns as if surveying the whole place, noting that the man in the back is indeed staring at him. If his hand weren’t already a mess, he’d call out to ask what the fuck his problem was. He turns back to face the bar when he hears Kev drop the ice pack in front of him.

“Thanks,” he says, pressing it against bare skin. It burns, but it’s not worse than the ache from pounding his fist against some dipshit’s face. 

“You know that guy?” Kev asks, keeping his face neutral and not looking to the back corner. It’s smoother than Mickey would ever give him credit for. Mickey shakes his head. “He asked about you when he came in.”

“Five oh?” Mickey asks, already tensing to jump off the stool, maybe run out the back into the alley. 

“Not sure. Army, maybe?” Kev says. Mickey relaxes for a second and then panic makes him stop breathing. If something happened to Ian, would they be looking for Mickey? It seems unlikely, but it’s the only connection he can think to make. His mind spins out of control so quickly he barely hears Kev murmur a heads up that the guy is headed his way. He’s not thinking about how to beat it out of the bar anymore, but steeling himself for bad news. 

The man sits on the stool next to Mickey and places his empty glass on the bar. Mickey sees that it must have been water, since there are no suds clinging to the sides. “Can I get another?” he asks, and his voice is deep and with an accent Mickey can’t quite place. New York, maybe.

Kev swaps the glass for a full one of water. “You gonna order something I can charge ya for?”

The man smiles tightly. “Another round for Mr. Milkovich.” Kev has officially lost his chill, his eyes cutting right over to Mickey and widening in fear. “Don’t worry, your friend’s not in trouble.” Mickey doesn’t know why, but he nods to Kev to give him the all clear.

Neither of them say anything until Kev comes back with another beer for Mickey. He looks like he’s going to stick around to keep an eye on things, but then the man turns to Mickey for the first time. “Let’s talk in the back. It’s a little more private.”

Mickey’s heart is still pounding, waiting for the hammer to drop on Ian, but he manages to nod dumbly and follow the guy back to his booth. Mickey gets the seat with his back to the front door, not ideal, but he keeps his hand on the neck of his beer in case he needs to break it off and use it as a weapon.

They sit there in silence for a few long minutes. Mickey feels himself start to sweat without really understanding why as the man looks him over. 

“You’re smaller than I expected,” he says, finally. 

“Yeah, I get that a lot,” Mickey says back. “The fuck do you want?” If it’s Ian, if he’s hurt, or he’s...gone, Mickey just wants the band-aid to get ripped off already. And if he’s gotta fight someone, he’d rather just get started.

“Did you ever think about joining the army?”  
Mickey laughs once. The man looks back at him, his expression unchanged. Mickey laughs again, slapping the table. “You’re fucking kidding me, right? Are you recruiting me?”

“Why is that funny?”

Mickey’s laughter is bordering on hysterical now, but that’s partly relief. This isn’t about Ian at all. This is just some ridiculous joke. 

“Oh, right, I forgot the army was dying for juvenile delinquents who barely passed the eighth grade.”

“You’re nineteen, not a juvenile anymore.” The man still looks deadly serious and it’s not so funny anymore.

“What are you gettin’ at? The fuck would the army want with me?”

“You’re not the ideal soldier.” He takes a sip of his water and looks at Mickey calmly. “But when war changes, the army changes with it. We have new initiatives that require...special skills.”

None of that makes any sense to Mickey, and he’s had enough. He takes a swig of his beer and starts to get up. “Yeah, well, good luck with that. Unless cutting coke is on your list, I’m not what you’re looking for.”

“Don’t get up yet,” the man says and something in his voice tells Mickey to stay put. “Not until you’ve heard everything I have to say.” He waits for Mickey to sit down fully before he continues. “I know you, Mickey. I know your life. There’s nothing for you here. You’re gonna die young and you’re not gonna leave a pretty corpse. What I’m offering you is the chance to leave this place and do something you can be proud of. It’s going to be dangerous, but you’ll have more of a chance at life than you do here.”

Mickey has to forced himself to take a drink of beer. “That little speech supposed to convince me?” 

“No. But this might.” He pulls a slip of paper out from the inside of his jacket and slides it across the table to Mickey. Mickey unfolds it and sees a check with his name on it and more zeroes than he thought would fit on it. 

“What the fuck kind of suicide mission is this? You sending me to Iraqistan to get blown up so my piece of shit father gets to kick back for the rest of his life?” Mickey spits. 

“Not a suicide mission. And your father won’t see a dime. Your wife, though, we can change her situation.” He shrugs. “If you want.”

Mickey shakes his head, looking back down at the check again. Something isn’t right. As far as he knows, the army doesn’t go around throwing cash at trash like him. “Fuck you. I’m outta here.” He tosses the check back in the guy’s direction and gets up.

The guy’s fast and he grabs Mickey by the arm before he can walk away. Mickey tries to break his hold, but his grip is too strong.

“You’ve got twenty-four hours to think about it. The money’s yours. This place will be nothing but a memory.” He lets go of Mickey’s arm only to grab his hand and open it, placing the check and a little white business card in his palm and closing it up. On his way out, he tosses a bill onto the bar.

“Yeah, fuck you very much!” Kev calls after the door’s already shut. He stares at Mickey as Mickey walks up to the bar. “You okay? The fuck was that?”

Mickey stares at the door the man walked out of, confused and shaken. He can’t stop thinking about the money in his hand. It’s life-changing money. But he has no idea what he has to do to keep it. 

“I don’t know,” he says, still looking at the door. “I got no fuckin’ clue.”

***

The best news Mickey gets all day is a text from Iggy telling him that Terry’s on a road trip to Canada to pick up some heroin from a new supplier. Terry always makes the first deals, make sure people check out. It’s partly because he doesn’t trust his kids, partly because he likes cracking skulls when things go wrong. Either way, it’s Mickey’s lucky day because Svetlana’s taken off, too, and only Mandy’s home when he gets there.

She’s at the kitchen table, her waitress uniform still on and an assortment of diner food spread out in front of her. He barely acknowledges her before kicking out a chair for himself and digging into a lukewarm container of chicken and waffles. 

“You’re welcome, pig,” Mandy says, pulling a cup of mashed potatoes out of his reach. Mickey grunts in response, ignoring her disgusted look when he sops up syrup with a torn off piece of waffle and shoves it into his mouth with his hands. “God, I can’t believe someone married your nasty ass.”

“Like she had a fuckin’ choice,” he says around a mouthful of food. He rolls his eyes when Mandy gives him a pitying look. 

They start picking through the food. Mandy stabs him in the hand with a plastic fork when he tries to take more than his fair share of fries. They both crack up and Mickey realizes it’s been a while since he laughed because something was funny, instead of just fucked up. Ian was one of the only people who could get him to genuinely laugh, even though all his jokes were corny as hell. Maybe that was what happened when you wanted to fuck someone all the time, it put a shine on everything.

Because apparently he’s got a problem with running his mouth or maybe because his dad’s out for the night, Mickey blurts out what he’s thinking. “You talked to Ian lately?”

Mandy looks startled for a second, like she never expected him to admit that he thought about Ian at all. She bites her lip and shakes her head. “Not for a while.”

He nods, he wants to let it go at that, but he can’t. “How long?”

“Couple months, I guess.” Mandy starts putting the tops on the containers, avoiding Mickey’s eyes. 

It’s like getting a hit off his favorite drug. He wants to stop, but he can’t. Mandy has what he needs and he wants all of it. “What happened? He still in the army?”

Mandy stops what she’s doing and looks back up at him, her face suddenly furious. “Why the fuck do you care now? You didn’t do shit when he was leaving. Too much of a fucking pussy.” She stands up, stacks the containers, and practically heaves them into the fridge. When she looks at him again, her face and chest are splotched red with anger. 

He doesn’t really know how to diffuse it without admitting things he’s not ready to. So he just shakes his head, shrugs, hopes she still has some pity left.

She crosses her arms over her chest and leans back against the counter, sizing him up. After a little bit she shakes her head, but something settles on her face. “He got chosen for some special project. Top secret or some shit. Couldn’t tell me anything, but he was really excited.” She runs a hand through her hair and looks stressed. “It was only supposed to be two weeks, but he’s been totally off the grid.”

Just like before in the bar, Mickey feels his heart try to stop in his chest. He can’t think about Ian being missing or dead for more than a few seconds before it feels like he can’t breathe. Mandy seems to sense his panic, forcing a smile. “He’s probably fine, I’m just being paranoid. Saving the fucking world’s a little more important than texting your best friend, right?”

He nods. “Right,” he croaks out. He stands up, suddenly desperate to be alone, to not be confronted with his sister’s fear on top of his own. He doesn’t say anything else, just stumbles off to his room and slams the door behind him.

***

Ian’s in the doorway, leaning against the frame. Mickey’s showing him all the blank space on the wall where there used to be a bunch of stupid shit. He looks unimpressed, keeps rolling his eyes toward the hall.

“Leaving,” Ian says.

Mickey feels that familiar panic rise up in his chest. “Where you goin’?”

This isn’t the way it really went, it changes every time. He tries so hard to find the right words to get him to stay, but he never does.

“Army. Signed up.”

Mickey’s head is shaking, his hands are, too. “You can’t. You’re not old enough.”

“I got special skills.” Ian grins, but his eyes aren’t right. None of it is right. He’s in uniform already, why didn’t Mickey notice that? And it’s dark at the cuffs, stained and wet. 

“Don’t go.” If he added that one word, would Ian still be here? “Please.”

“Already gone,” Ian says, shrugs. “You coming with?”

Mickey wakes up sweating. He wipes his face and thinks maybe he was crying, too. Svetlana’s in bed, must have come in the middle of the night. She grunts and pulls the covers tighter around herself, facing away from him. 

He gets out of bed, strips off his shirt and leaves it on the floor. The bathroom light makes him squint. He turns on the shower faucet and sits on the toilet seat while he waits for the water to heat up a bit. The basket of magazines on the floor is calling to him, and after that dream he’s too weak to resist. He flips open the well-worn pages and pulls out the photograph of Ian he keeps there.

The photo’s starting to get beat up and wrinkled from all the moisture and the times he’s taken it out. He runs his fingers over Ian’s face, trying to smooth it down. He wishes for the millionth time that he had the real thing in front of him, that he’d had the balls to stop him from leaving. Ian’s raised middle finger reads like a message just for Mickey, forever telling him to fuck off. 

He puts it carefully back into the magazine and slides the book back into the basket. He strips off his boxers and gets under the spray, just on the border of being too hot. 

He remembers the time Ian asked him what he thought about in the shower. He had this smirking, cocky look on his face like he knew Mickey thought about him. But Mickey also knew it was Ian’s totally unsubtle way of trying to get Mickey into the shower with him. If only he could tell him how badly he wanted to, but that was back when he was always worrying about shit being too fucking gay. 

“Who thinks in the shower?” he’d asked, crumpling up a random scrap of paper and throwing it at Ian’s head. Ian dodged it easily and rolled his eyes.

“Everyone, asshole,” he’d replied.

“Well what the fuck do you think about then?”

Ian sat back on the couch, pretending to think about it. Mickey had to bite his lip to keep from laughing. Ian was the least smooth person in the world, but Mickey liked that about him. He was the only terrible liar Mickey knew, and it was kinda nice to have one fucking person he could read like an open book.

“Drills. Geometry, sometimes.” Ian grinned and Mickey knew something filthy was coming. He wasn’t ready for it when Ian said, “The way you take my cock.” 

Mickey felt his face heat up and he kicked Ian hard in the shin. It was taking all his concentration not to fucking squirm, but he couldn’t help feeling pleased. Even if Ian was just making this shit up to try to get him naked, it felt good. He believed that Ian thought about him when he wasn’t around. He just wasn’t ready to admit he did the same thing and wasn’t sure he ever would be.

They didn’t end up in the shower that day, of course they didn’t. Just another bead in the long string of missed opportunities and things he’d learn to regret. 

That brought him back to the present, that check tucked safely away now in his drawer. It was impossible to unsee that amount of money, to not think about all the things it could buy. And there was a tiny voice inside his head, whispering Ian’s name, making him wonder if this was a sign pointing down a path back to him.

The worst that could happen in this situation didn’t feel a whole lot different than his everyday life. He was constantly being put in harm’s way, one wrong word or bad deal away from ending up bagged and tagged. What if he didn’t have to do it on his father’s word, but his own?

He shut off the shower and climbed out, drying off with a towel that smelled strongly of mildew. Why was he clinging to a place that would never be clean, in more ways than one? 

Back in his room, he opens the drawer and grabs the card and his phone, then heads into the living room. He sits on the couch, the filth and mess obvious even in the low morning light. Before he can think about it too hard, he dials the number on the card.

It rings once before the man from the bar picks up. “Mr. Milkovich.”

Mickey’s legs start bouncing and he’s biting his lip hard enough that it might bleed. “Yeah, I’m in. Just.” He takes a deep breath, closes his eyes. “Whatever it is. I’ll fuckin’ do it.”

***

The apartment building they’ve put Mickey up in is innocuous from the outside. It looks like any of the other dozens of industrial-looking places in the neighborhood, impossible to tell if it has occupants. He’d walked around a little bit and found that apparently that’s the look all of Brooklyn is going for. 

The place itself is huge and open, two things he’s not used to. It’s a loft-style apartment, the few walls ending several feet before the ceiling, more for decoration than any kind of boundary. It makes it hard to sleep at night for some reason, since he’s spent his whole life being closed in.

He’s only there for a day before the phone they gave him rings. It’s an unknown number, but he picks it up anyway. He mutters a greeting and the person at the other end doesn’t bother with the formality. They rattle off an address and cross streets and tell him to be there in thirty minutes. 

There’s a map on the counter and it doesn’t take long for him to find where he’s supposed to go. It doesn’t look very far, but he has nothing else to do so he leaves immediately. He figures he can case the place a little before he has to go inside. 

What is absolutely not a surprise is that the address is yet another industrial, unmarked building. There’s a roll-up, steel garage door instead of a front entrance that’s been graffitied over. The tags look fake to Mickey’s eye, like someone was trying really hard to make it blend in with the rest of the block. 

When he gets closer, there’s a mailbox that looks like it might have a camera inside. As he’s bent in front of it, trying to decide for sure, he hears a buzzer and the garage door starts to roll up. It stops about ten inches off the ground and Mickey stares at the gap.

His phone buzzes after a second. There’s a text message from an unknown number.

Door’s open.

“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” Mickey says. He looks at the mailbox, not really knowing if whoever’s operating the camera can even hear him. “Fuck you, if you think I’m rolling around on the fuckin’ ground.” He points a finger accusingly at the mailbox.

In response, the garage door goes down an inch closer to the ground.

His phone buzzes again. I don’t have all day.

Shaking his head and muttering curses, Mickey crouches down on the ground and considers his options. None of them are smooth and all of them will end up with him covered in dirt and god knows what else.

“Man, fuck this fuckin’ place,” he says, as he sits heavily on his butt and lays back before rolling under the door. Half a second after he clears it, it shuts heavily beside him. “Ay! You coulda taken my fuckin’ head off!”

He sits up and looks around, trying to see if there’s anyone around. The room is pitch dark now that the door’s shut, and it feels empty and big. His heart speeds up. Suddenly he realizes how much this situation could go really, deadly wrong. Just when he’s about to start panicking, rows of fluorescent lights start coming on above his head. The room reveals itself gradually, huge and mostly empty.

Down at the far end is a cluster of metal tables, arranged in a U. He can see a laptop blinking, and some black boxes. There’s also a lone figure with their back to him.

“You just gonna sit there all day?” the person calls out to him, and it’s a woman. Mickey pushes himself up with his hands and brushes off his clothes as he walks toward her. Somehow learning that it’s a chick he’s going to be dealing with makes him feel less afraid. 

It feels like he has to walk half a mile to get to her, and when he gets there any sense of comfort he had in identifying the gender of his companion has evaporated. There are neat stacks of paper, flagged with little yellow ribbons. The black boxes up close are cases, reinforced and likely containing shit he doesn’t want to fuck with. And there’s a small metal tray with a mean line-up of syringes, each filled with a liquid so blue it doesn’t even look real.

The woman turns to face him, a serene smile on her face. She’s beautiful, with bobbed auburn hair, and what looks like a perfect body. She’s smaller than he is, but it’s not comforting. She points to the chair tucked under the metal table next to his hip. “Have a seat.”

Unable to look away from the needles--Jesus Christ, they’re fucking thick--he pulls out the chair and sits down. He feels sweat starting to form at his temples. Either that shit is going in him if he doesn’t cooperate, or it’s exactly what he signed up for.

“Don’t look so nervous,” she says, typing out a fast string of characters before snapping the laptop shut. “Paperwork first.”

She’s walked him through what feels like three reams before he even realizes she hasn’t given him her name. When he asks, she just smiles and points to the next line for him to initial. It takes forty-five minutes to get through it all. She speaks occasionally, lets him read paragraphs that make very little sense. It’s enough for him to get the gist: he will probably die, but in the event that he does the people he cares about will have a new life. And in the event that he doesn’t, that won’t change, they’re just unlikely to see him again.

He pauses over the last line, tapping the pen lightly just to the right of it. The nervous ache that started just under his ribs is spreading. 

“Do you have a question?”

He wipes his mouth with his hand and then lets it rest on the back of his neck. The collar of his t-shirt feels like it’s choking him. “It’s just. A lot, I guess. Not seeing my.” He clears his throat, surprised by his own thoughts and the words coming out of his mouth. “I got a kid coming. Might be mine, anyway.”

She nods, but just looks at him steadily. He wishes she would say something comforting, to stem the panic that’s rising in his throat like a scream. But she just waits calmly, gives him nothing.

He tilts his head back to look up at the lights. What could he offer to a kid anyway? Probably exactly what he got growing up. That lovely cycle of violence would just keep on spinning. Svetlana might not do much better, but at least they won’t be at each other’s throats. No, going home wouldn’t change anything for the better. Ian had the right idea, to get as far away from Mickey as possible.

The pen scratches across the line, his last MM barely legible. He tosses the pen down on the table, knows it fell to the floor, but can’t hear it over the blood suddenly rushing in his ears. A cool hand on his wrist brings him back to reality.

He jerks his arm back and holds it to his chest. “The fuck?”

“Paperwork’s done. On to phase two.” She waves her hand palm up over the tray of syringes. Mickey takes a deep breath and holds it, feels the blood draining from his face. “If you’re gonna puke, just give me some warning,” she says. “These pants are new.”

The ridiculousness of that makes Mickey laugh out loud. She grins and holds out her hand for his arm. He slowly lets it away from his body and she’s more careful this time when she circles his wrist with her small fingers, pushing his sleeve up with her other hand. He can feel the strength in her grip, wonders if she’s been where he is now. She pulls a length of rubber from behind the tray and ties it tight just above his elbow then taps out a vein with two fingers.

She pulls on a pair of rubber gloves and wipes the inside of his elbow with a cotton ball. He looks away, wishing there was actually something to look at. The bite of the first needle is intense enough to make his eyes water. He closes his free hand into a fist and pounds it against the table.

“Easy.” 

The pull out is almost as painful as the push in, and Mickey doesn’t even want to know how many are left to go. He exhales a shaky breath and chances a look down at his arm. There’s only a small drop of blood, which calms him somewhat.

He sees the first syringe drop into a small red bin under the table. She looks up at him as she reaches for the next one. “If you can believe it, we used to do these all at once.”

“Seriously?” He can’t imagine how excruciating that must have been, let alone the logistics of taking so many needles at the same time.

“Thank god for technological advances.” She slides the next needle in and it hurts a lot worse, so bad he has to close his eyes and hold his breath. When it’s done and he opens his eyes, he feels tears run down the sides of his face. He quickly wipes them away with his free hand. 

He’s grateful that she doesn’t ask him if he’s okay, just reaches for the next. He notices a burning sensation creeping up his arm and down to his fingers. The next needle makes him hiss and he has no control over the next flood of tears.

“Yeah, it gets a bit worse as it goes on,” she says. “You’re doing better than most, though.”

All he can do is raise an eyebrow at her and try not to kick her in the stomach. His legs don’t feel like they’d hold him up if he tried to run away.

By the time it’s over, Mickey’s shirt is soaked through and every breath feels hard-won. His head is swimming and the muscles in his legs and arms are trembling. He gave up trying to pretend he wasn’t crying after the fourth one, didn’t even speak when she used a tissue to wipe his face for him. He doesn’t know how he’s supposed to go anywhere after this. There better be a wheelchair or a fucking gurney to get him wherever he’s expected to be now.

He starts to gather the strength to ask her about that very thing when like a bad fever the pain simply breaks. One second he’s sitting there in agony, and the next it’s all gone, replaced with something else. It’s like energy thrumming under his skin. His body feels lighter, his breath is coming easier, like his lungs are getting real air for the first time.

“What the fuck, lady?” He holds both hands out in front of him, expecting some Spider-Man-level transformation shit. But they look exactly the same.

She grins and starts to clean up the station, packing away his paperwork and everything else into the reinforced cases. “You can go back to the apartment. There’ll be a briefing tomorrow and then you’ll get your first assignment.”

“That’s it?” he says. “You shoot me up with all that shit and then I just go home?”

“That’s it.” She snaps one of the cases shut and stands up. “I suggest a nap.”

***

A nap is the furthest thing from his mind on the walk home. He marvels at the world around him, what was once gray and dingy is suddenly washed in color. He’d been fighting the notion that he needed glasses for years, getting by with a good memory and guesswork. But now it’s like his vision is crystal clear, better than twenty-twenty.

The three flights up to his apartment had killed him the first time he climbed them, but this time his breath doesn’t speed up a bit. His calves and thighs feel much the same as he did when he was walking on flat ground. 

Once inside he realizes that he’s starving. He goes for the fridge, which he noticed before leaving earlier was fully stocked. But then he’d been too nervous to eat. Now he’s pulling every container off the shelf and throwing it onto the massive kitchen island. He barely looks at what he’s about to consume before stuffing things into his mouth. Chewing and swallowing feel like major inconveniences to just get it all inside him. When he’s done gorging himself he expects to feel a punch of sick regret. It never comes. 

Instead he’s hit with his jaw opening for a massive yawn. His eyelids are a thousand pounds each and it’s a struggle to stay standing. Not bothering to clean up the food, he leaves the remains on the island, and staggers for the massive couch, stripping off his shoes and pants as he goes.

When his head hits the soft, gray pillows he’s out.

***

The apartment is dark when he wakes up. It could be hours later or days, he has no idea. All he does know is that he needs to piss something fierce. He stumbles quickly to the bathroom and relieves himself. When he’s done he washes his face and considers his reflection in the mirror. For the first time in years he doesn’t look tired. He’s still pale as fuck, but the dark circles under his eyes after disappeared along with the little lines forming at the corners. He actually looks like a nineteen-year-old. 

“Creepy,” he says, wrapping one hand around his chin. 

There’s a soft noise from the kitchen that pre-blue-liquid Mickey would never have heard. But now his hackles are instantly up. He shuts the bathroom light and opens the door silently, keeping his body against the wall in the hallway.

He can see a little bit and it must be the improved eyesight because the apartment is still nearly pitch black. When he gets to the kitchen, the hairs on the back of his neck are standing up. There’s a shape next to the island that’s either his jacket or a person, he’s not sure which. Just as he’s about to throw himself in its direction, the lights come on. 

He has to shield his eyes, but it only takes a second to adjust. The shape is just his jacket, but there’s the man from the bar standing by the front door, his hands still on the lights.

“Hungry?”

***

They end up at a dark, wood-paneled bar a few blocks away. The guy orders him a beer and gives the bartender a look when he tries to check Mickey for ID. He’s got a fake, but apparently it’s some kind of insult that they were asked, so Mickey doesn’t say anything. The bartender only seems moderately pissed off when he settles Mickey’s drink in front of him.

The place is quiet, with only one, older guy down at the other end of the bar and a couple in their seventies seated at a table near the back. The man waits for the bartender to walk away before speaking to Mickey.

“How are you feeling, Mr. Milkovich?” He takes a sip of his beer, looking Mickey over above the rim of the glass.

“Can you please stop fucking calling me that? And can I get your fuckin’ name? Feel like I’m hanging out with a bunch of fucking ghosts.” Mickey takes a huge swallow of his beer, noticing the depth of flavor. He has to bite back a moan, it tastes so good he’s barely angry anymore.

“Alexander Pierce,” he says, holding his hand out. Mickey eyes him warily, but holds his out to shake, too. His grip is firm and he waits until Mickey looks directly at him before he lets go. “You prefer Mickey.” Mickey nods. “Fine. How are you feeling, Mickey?”

Mickey takes stock of himself. This morning he could have catalogued a dozen little complaints, but now he comes up empty. “Good. I guess.”

Pierce laughs and takes a drink. “Good? Okay.” He gestures for the bartender to come back to them and orders another round, plus two steaks. Mickey would make a comment about ordering for himself, but his stomach rumbles at the idea of some red meat. 

“We moved your wife out of your father’s house. Your sister decided to go with her.” 

Mickey looks up, startled. “Where?”

Pierce takes a sip of his drink and won’t look at Mickey. “Classified.”

Mickey’s lost count of the number of times he’s lost the air in his lungs recently. He was okay with never seeing Svetlana again. More than okay, really. The kid wasn’t even here yet. It was odd, but he made peace with that, too. Or thought he could. But his sister. He wasn’t ready for that one.

“She’s safe now,” Mickey says, and Pierce seems to understand both that it’s a question and who he’s talking about. He nods. Mickey stares down at the bar, trying to fully process that he’s spoken to his sister for the last time. Probably. “What’d you tell my dad?”

“Does it matter?” The expression on Pierce’s face makes him question if his father is even still alive.

“Guess not.”

“Here’s a tip, Mickey. I think it’ll serve you well to remember it. Don’t ask questions you don’t want to know the answer to.” He lifts his drink and tips his head to indicate Mickey should lift his own. Obediently, Mickey holds up his glass. “Cheers,” Pierce says, and slams his glass into Mickey’s.

The glass shatters in his hand, slicing right through it. In a second, there’s blood all over the bar, the bartender rushing over to wrap Mickey’s hand in a white napkin. It’s soaked through immediately. His hand hurts, he can feel the glass grinding in. He looks at Pierce, stunned. But the guy is just as calm as always. He puts a hand on Mickey’s elbow and leads him to the bathroom. 

“The fuck is wrong with you?” Mickey hisses as they enter the bathroom, holding his hand up over his head to try to slow the flow of blood. 

Pierce says nothing, just brings him over to the sink. He guides Mickey’s hand over the basin and starts to carefully peel back the napkin. He drops the soaking cloth onto the counter with a wet splat, then turns on the cold faucet.

“Seriously, we’re gonna just run this under a cold tap? I gotta go to a hospital, fuck!”

Again, Pierce is silent, his hand circling Mickey’s wrist and bringing it under the water. The water runs red, and Mickey sees a few glints of glass along with it. 

But he doesn’t feel any pain, just the cold. Pierce pumps a bit of soap and works it into Mickey’s palm. More glass shakes off into the sink, and the water is only pink, then clear. Mickey pulls his hand out of Pierce’s grasp and lifts it up to his face. The hand that looked like chopped liver not a minute before is now perfectly intact, only the barest hints of a few fading pink lines. Right in front of his eyes, they disappear entirely, like the whole thing never happened.

Mickey can’t help but stare at his hand. He knows he was cut, badly. All that blood had to come from somewhere. And the napkin is still sitting there, completely soaked through. But there’s no evidence of any injury now. His mind doesn’t even know what to do with the information. He wants to laugh and also run screaming from the restaurant, away from the crazy fuck who knew he could crush a glass in his hand and not need a single band-aid afterwards.

When he can finally bring himself to look over at Pierce, he feels like his heart will stop. The man is full-on grinning, leaning back against the sink. He looks so pleased, and Mickey isn’t sure he wants to know why.

“So, Mickey. How are you feeling now?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Blood warning, needle warning


	3. I knew him

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings at the end

“First solo and it’s a fuckin’ smash and grab,” Mickey mutters to himself. It’s slightly more complicated than that, but as he stands amid the chaos he was ordered to create, it feels exactly that simple. Except, instead of the debris of a urine-soaked crack house, there’s hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of lab equipment in ruins at his feet. Not to mention the cost of the precious workload hours that will need to be spent recreating whatever science-y bullshit he’s destroyed.

Doesn’t matter to Mickey, though. From his point of view, these scientists must have been doing something shady if SHIELD decided to fuck their shit up. All he cares about is that his very first assignment as a junior agent is nearly complete. He’s got a secured vial of a virus in the pocket of his vest, and he’s strategically left behind the fingerprints he was given so it looks like someone else did the job. Some local dealer or middle man or some such shit. He wasn’t really paying attention to that part.

Last thing on his list before he beats it the fuck out of there is to set a small fire in one of the back offices. According to the senior agent who explained it to him, the fire will destroy the results of a minor, but somewhat controversial drug trial. Lighting it up will lead the local cops down a dead end, thinking that was the target instead of what Mickey actually took.

He makes his way through the maze of hallways until he comes to the right door. He slams a gloved fist into the keypad next to the door, which he’d been told would work just as well as the code. It stings, but only for a second, and by then the door has unlocked and he can stride in.

The office looks completely ordinary, filing cabinets along one wall, a desk with two expensive-looking screens on top. But there isn’t much to set on fire. Mickey walks around behind the desk until he sees what he’s looking for: a small, plastic garbage can partially filled with crumpled papers. He pulls a stick of flint out of one of the pockets on his vest. All it takes is a swipe of his thumb to light up, and then he drops it into the basket. He waits to make sure that the papers catch before going back to the office door. 

Just as he’s about to turn the handle, he hears the faint sound of crunching glass. It’s far away, but it’s definitely footsteps, at least two people.

“Shit,” he whispers. It could be security, which would be the best-case scenario. He was sent in tonight partially because of the employees scheduled to be on duty, all known to spend their shifts catching up on sleep rather than closely monitoring security cameras. He looks behind him to assess the window in the office, but the garbage has really started to go up, and the window looks a little too small, even for him.  

He presses his ear to the door. He can still hear movement, but it sounds further away, so he takes a chance and moves quickly into the hallway, immediately putting his back to the door. He unholsters the tranq gun from his right hip and sidesteps quickly towards the exit. 

Just as he’s ten or so feet away, a dark shape crosses the hall in front of him. Whoever it was doesn’t see him, but it still makes Mickey’s heart stop. He’s almost positive now that it’s not security, since any normal person would have triggered the alarm at the sight of all the chaos Mickey caused, or at least they’d be talking about it. But Mickey has no idea who else it could be, or what kind of danger that puts him in. 

He closes his eyes briefly to conjure up the floor plan in his head. He can’t go back the way he came in, not with the surprise guests in his way. The office he’s set on fire is also a no go. That leaves one other exit, but it’s on the opposite side of the building with a long, exposed run through the parking lot at the end of it. He wishes he could consult the agents in the van waiting for him, but he’s on radio silence until he gets outside. 

He looks back towards the fire, and he can see orange glowing through the small pane of glass in the door. It’s about to get real obvious real fast, so Mickey has to move before the others notice. 

With one last look at his original exit, he takes off towards the opposite end of the building. Just a few seconds after he turns his first corner, he hears an explosion, the fire bursting through the office door. He breaks out into a true run and is almost at his second turn before someone’s shouting, either at him or about him. He takes the turn so hard his shoulder slams into the wall and he feels the breeze of a bullet go past his temple.

If there were time to think about how close the shot came to taking his head off, he’d be panicking, but instead he’s counting the number of steps to his next turn, and swapping out the tranq in his hand for something with real fucking bullets. His instructions were clear: the gun was in case of emergency only. He’s still green, but somebody trying to blow his brains out feels like it warrants the real thing.

He gets to the next turn and pauses right around the corner to take one quick breath, then double-back and return fire on his pursuer. They’re clearly not expecting it, if the cursing he hears is any indication. He’s not sure if he got a hit, but fires off two more shots before taking off running again. 

It should only be another sixty seconds before he’s out of the building, but it feels like a year. The footsteps are still behind him, one set strong and sure, the other sounding like maybe he did do some damage after all. The last stretch is the worst, he’s got no turns left, and if they all keep up the same pace, his back will be totally exposed for fifteen feet. He’s got a vest on, but that won’t protect his head or his legs, which they’re most likely to go for. 

Trying to give himself a few extra seconds, he fires over his shoulder as he runs, not knowing at all if he’s even coming close to hitting anything, but hoping it’s at least a distraction. He pumps his legs even faster, feeling them and his lungs start to burn. But if he slows down, he’s pretty much dead.

Finally, he can see the door he’s meant to go through and he’s almost halfway down the hall in just a few breaths. He can count down to when they’ll catch up to him and have a clear shot. They start firing as soon as he’s in view, and all Mickey can do is weave side to side and stay low. He’s concentrating on the ground beneath him and the door ahead of him, closing the distance as he fast as he possibly can.

The first bullet connects with the vest, right under his rib cage. The pain is excruciating, radiating out immediately, but he can’t let it cause more than a stutter in his step. A few more fly past his head and hip, and his fingertips hit the door just as another connects, this time with his thigh.

He flies out the door, hitting the ground hard, hands first, before rolling up into a ball and landing back on his feet. His right leg wants to give out where the bullet went in, but he just slams it down even harder to keep moving, focusing all of his energy on putting one foot in front of the other. 

The pair on his heels burst out of the doors a few seconds later, but just as Mickey turns to fire back at them, he sees them both drop to the ground. He doesn’t linger to try to figure out how, sprinting across the parking lot despite the growing agony spreading through his leg. The van should be parked half a block to the west, waiting to take him back to SHIELD headquarters. 

He spots it just as his vision is starting to blur from the pain, when he feels his resolve beginning to crack under the pressure of his muscles shredding. He yanks open the door to the van and throws himself inside with the last ounces of energy he has. Someone else shuts it behind him, and he barely hands off the vial in his pocket before he blacks out.

***

Ian’s behind him, panting, which isn’t unusual except when they’re doing this. Running. Ian’s always in front for that kind of shit, faster, and with longer legs. But Mickey got a jump on him at the sound of the sirens, that smug fucking doctor laid out on the ground.

Mickey looks back at Ian, thrilled to see that Ian’s got a grin as big as his, not mad anymore. It makes him feel like a kid again, wanting nothing simpler than someone to chase him just for fun. 

When they get past the dumpster and pause against the brick wall, it’s another bolt of lightning up his spine, the way Ian shoves him hard, but doesn’t take his hands off him. The bricks dig into his skin, but it’s just the right side of rough. And something about being stuck between Ian and a hard place feels right. 

They’re both laughing, breathless, Ian trying to pretend he’s still shocked, angry. But he’s so easy to read, Mickey knows it’s gone. They keep staring at each other’s mouths, and fuck, all Mickey wants is for Ian to pin him against the wall and take what they both need. Their hipbones knock together, and the pain feels better than it should. But then Ian waits too long, hesitates, and Mickey has no choice but to push back and take off again. It’s still fun, still feels so good, but there’s that little ache of what could have been.

***

“Who’s Ian?” someone asks as he comes to. He’s in his bed in the dormitory, which is several steps removed from the group home the Milkovich kids occasionally found themselves in, but close enough to put Mickey on edge every time he wakes up.

He sits upright, knowing his leg should hurt where he got shot, but feeling no more than a dull ache. He presses his fingers into the spot, his brain a little satisfied when the pain increases. It’s still not  _ normal _ , but at least he can tell it happened.

“Hello?” Mickey rolls his eyes and looks over at Kima, who’s sitting on her own bed a few rows away. They’re not supposed to tell each other personal details like where they’re from, but Mickey’s heard “Straight Outta Compton” come out of her earbuds enough times that he can take a wild guess.

“Why do you care?” he asks roughly, getting onto his feet to bounce on his heels a bit. There’s a tiny pain in his lower back, too, and he kneads it out with his hand. 

“I don’t. Just like to know if one of my teammates is a fuckin’ nutjob.” She smirks and looks back down at the tablet in her hand. Mickey rolls his eyes, but decides not to respond, heading towards the showers instead. He smells rank, like someone who was running for their life, which he was. Only thing he doesn’t know is how long ago that all happened

Before he steps into the bathroom, he turns back to Kima. “You know how long I was out?”

“What am I, your fuckin’ secretary?” she says, without looking up. But she’s half-smiling. Mickey likes her, mostly because she says fuck almost as much as he does. And he’s pretty sure she could kill kim, but hasn’t yet. “I don’t know, a day, I think.”

“Jesus,” he says, shaking his head. 

Kima waits for him to push open the door before she says her last piece. “Don’t take too long. They’ve been waiting for a debrief. Told me to text as soon as you were up.” She holds up her tablet. 

“Shit,” he mutters. He hurries into the bathroom and enters one of the stalls, turning the water up just a degree shy of skin-peeling. SHIELD isn’t Club Med, but the amenities are better than he ever had in the South Side. If he were allowed to, he could probably stand under the hot spray all day and it would never run out.

But for the first time in his life, he’s not only aware of an authority’s timetable, but also afraid enough of it to respect it. He doesn’t linger in the shower, no matter how good it feels. He simply scrubs away the sweat, pausing only for a second to try to see where he got hit. The angle isn’t right, though, so he gives up and steps out of the shower to towel off quickly and redress.

When he’s back in the sleeping quarters, Kima’s gone. He’s surprised to find he’s a little disappointed. It hits him during quiet moments how alone he is now, and that it’s permanent. 

Luckily, quiet never lasts long enough for panic to truly take hold. A speaker over the doorway to the room makes a crackling, airy sound right before the calm voice of Agent Hill begins speaking.

“Milkovich, we’re waiting for you in the conference room.”

“Yup,” he says, throwing his towel down the laundry chute on his way out. He never wants to do as many pushups as he had to when he first just left his shit strewn around. Rumlow hadn’t let him stop until he puked.

The halls are quiet, another thing that’s been hard to get used to. Even given the number of family members typically incarcerated, the Milkovich house was always buzzing with some kind of noise, either from without or within. 

Mickey gets outside the conference room, the only one he’s been shown, though he knows there are lots more in the maze that is SHIELD. The wall is paneled entirely with glass, but he knocks before entering anyway, another lesson learned the hard way. Agent Hill looks up from the files spread in front of her and motions him in.

The conference room looks huge with only three people sitting at the giant table. Hill is at the head, looking impeccable as always. Rumlow is on her left, a snarl appearing on his face as soon as Mickey enters the room. And on Hill’s right, with his back to Mickey, is another agent he’s never met before. He turns his chair slightly to give Mickey a subtle once over, before turning back to Hill. It’s only the fear of Rumlow’s wrath that keeps Mickey from rolling his eyes as he waits to be verbally acknowledged, standing awkwardly just inside the room. To say the guy doesn’t like him is a major understatement.

Agent Hill makes him sweat for a good minute, before finally saying his name and motioning to the seat beside the new agent. “What happened yesterday, Mickey?” she asks, flipping a few pages in the file in front of her. She’s not looking at him, but that doesn’t mean she’s not paying attention. He realizes he could fill a book with all the lessons he learned in his first week of total insubordination. 

“Uh, I did the lab mission. Got what we went there for.” Mickey’s never given a report before and he can tell my Rumlow’s snort that he hasn’t gotten off to a great start on his first go.

“Seems like you’re leaving out a few details,” Hill says. He can’t tell if she’s smirking at him or if it’s just the way her face looks. 

The agent to his left gives him an encouraging look. Mickey doesn’t know who the guy is, but he’s got this guidance counselor air about him. But a good one, one that actually gives a shit. It’s fuckin’ weird. Mickey can’t help but make a face before turning back to Hill.

“I extracted the vial of CHV-5 from the lab. Also, destroyed the equipment in room A and set the fire in office 6.” Hill nods, and the other agent gives him a closed-mouth smile. Rumlow looks as unimpressed as ever, but doesn’t say anything.

“And you applied the fingerprints you were provided?” Hill asks, looking down at her paperwork again.

“Yup,” he says. She raises an eyebrow. “I mean, yes, ma’am.” She nods and Rumlow snorts. It takes all of Mickey’s willpower not to say something nasty, but Rumlow could snap him in half without breaking a sweat, and he’s made it clear he’s just waiting for the right opportunity.

“Thank you, Mickey. You can go join the others in the training room.” She closes the file and stares straight into his eyes. As usual, it’s unnerving, but Mickey’s trying to get used to it. He’s pretty sure she’s training--or testing--him to maintain eye contact. But it still makes him uneasy.

He nods and stands, relieved to no longer be keeping Hill’s intense gaze. He looks at the unknown agent again, then back to Hill, hoping she’ll explain the guy’s deal if he just lingers long enough. 

“Is there something else?” she asks, smirking at him a little. She knows exactly what he’s after, but she’s clearly not going to give an answer. It would’ve been cool to go to training knowing something else the others possibly didn’t. There isn’t a lot of currency among them, other than knowledge and favor from their superiors. Mickey’s pretty much bankrupt in both.

“No,” he says. “Thank you.” Hill nods again, friendlier this time, and so does the mystery guy. Rumlow, of course, regards him as if he just cut a fart. Then again, that may just be his resting face.

It’s another lonely walk and trip down a few levels in the elevator to get to the training room. But at least when he gets there, he’s greeted by the obvious sounds of life. 

The training room looks straight out of a scene from  _ 21 Jump Street _ , with rows of tables all facing a glass podium with a projector screen and white board behind it. The seats are filled with eleven other junior agents, all of whom were recruited around the same time as Mickey for the same project. It’s only among this group of loudmouth weirdos that Mickey feels even remotely comfortable at SHIELD.

When he was first thrown among them, Mickey assumed they would be at each other’s throats and all out on their asses within the first day. But somehow, they all sort of get along, or at least tolerate one another. It might be that they’re all outsiders when it comes to SHIELD and their impeccable agents.

In some ways, they are all markedly different; there was a kid in every color, not one sounding or acting alike. But in other ways, they are all too similar: loud, impulsive, clearly smarter on the streets than in any classroom. Mickey knew he wasn’t the only one who picked up on the fact that none of them seemed bothered by severing their old lives completely, and that it didn’t seem that anyone had grown up with a silver spoon in their mouth. There was something important to all of it put together, but Mickey couldn’t figure out exactly what. A dozen, street-hardened troublemakers all recruited by the same shadowy military organization to do--what? Save the world? It was something he thought Ian would be interested in figuring out. Or at least he’d have a bunch of moronic theories straight out of a Van Damme movie that would make Mickey laugh.

Mickey slides into the empty seat next to Kima, closer to the back of the room. It was hilarious how all of them avoided sitting too close to the podium. A clear sign that each of them had had their knuckles cracked or had their lack of preparation called out since the first grade. But Hill, Rumlow, and the other senior agents were gradually cracking down on letting them leave the first two rows empty. 

Kima raises her eyebrows at him, the closest he’s going to get to her asking him how the debrief went. He shrugs in response and she turns away, bored. He follows her eyes to a pair of the other recruits, one of them a huge Samoan dude called Lu and the other a lanky black guy named Isaiah who he’s noticed Kima spends a lot of time watching. They’re in the middle of an arm wrestling match, of all the ridiculous shit. But it’s not as uneven a fight as Mickey would have guessed. There’s sweat pouring down Isaiah’s face, but he’s hanging in there, and Lu looks like he’s actually afraid he could lose.

The other guys are all screaming encouragements and heckling in equal measure. Kima surprises Mickey by voicing her support for Isaiah. She looks at him after she does it to find him staring at her. “You got a problem, Milkovich?” she asks, cocking her head at him and clearly begging for the opportunity to let off some steam.

He holds his hands up in surrender and shakes his head, unable to keep a tiny smirk off his face. She lets it pass, though, and turns back to watch the show. 

Isaiah looks as if he may actually be able to hold out, their clasped hands twitching just half an inch closer to Lu. But then the door to the training room slams open, startling everyone except Lu, who brings Isaiah’s hand down onto the table with the same force as the door. Isaiah screams, partially from pain and partially from the injustice, but the look on Rumlow’s face as he stalks to the front of the room prevents him from complaining about the unfairness. 

“That wasn’t a win,” he hisses at Lu, who’s beaming with the flush of victory. Lu opens his mouth to fire back, but Rumlow silences all of them by slamming his fist onto the podium.

“Shut the fuck up,” he growls, looking around the room to make eye contact with each of them. When he gets to Mickey, his standard frown turns into a disgusted sneer. After he looks away, Kima gives Mickey a look as if to ask what the fuck he did. Mickey shakes his head, just as confused as to why the roided-out asshole hates him so much.

“You band of shitheads have your first team assignment,” he begins, using a small device to activate the screen behind him. The floor plan of a building appears and as he clicks again, three different entrances are circled in red. He rattles off assignments to groups A, B, and C. 

Mickey is, of course, in C, with the other kids who he’s come to recognize as the knuckleheads. They’ve all been given various assignments that involve basically being pointed in a direction and unleashed to destroy. Mickey’s the only one among them to only have gone on one mission, but he still feels slightly put out. He’s not a brain surgeon, but surely he’s smart enough to do more than bust kneecaps and make a mess.

By the end of the three-hour long meeting, they’ve gone over the layout of the warehouse and their various roles until everyone has it memorized. Thanks to the serum, when Mickey pays attention he finds he can retain instructions down to the number of steps it will take to enter a room without struggling in the slightest. The key part is the paying attention. 

Rumlow’s given them the all-clear to go back to their dormitory, and everyone’s nearly at the door when he calls Mickey’s name. They all stop and look back at the senior agent, then over to Mickey, fascinated as to what’s coming next.

“What?” Mickey says, knowing full well he might pay for the tone of his voice. But he’s tired, his brain worn out from all the drilling. Plus he hasn’t eaten since before his last mission, and his serum-enhanced metabolism causes him to get a bit more hangry than normal. 

“What did you say?” Rumlow says, his voice deadly. He walks until he’s right up in Mickey’s space, looming over him to emphasize the difference in their height and mass. 

Mickey’s brain gets the message, but the rest of him doesn’t want to cooperate. He’s had enough of Rumlow’s bullshit. If the guy has a problem with him, he wishes he’d just fucking out with it already.

“I said,  _ what _ , motherfucker.” There are nearly a dozen sharp intakes of breath from behind him, which combined acts like a wake-up call. Mickey may have just signed his own death warrant--or at least guaranteed he’s not sleeping until his body’s broken down by some insane physical challenge. 

For a second, it looks like Rumlow’s going to finally kill Mickey like he’s been wanting to. His hands clench into fists, and his eyes are filled with pure hatred. Mickey has a startling feeling of deja vu, like his father somehow followed him where SHIELD promised he could never be found.

But Rumlow surprises him by uncoiling in a breath. His eyes hold something sinister, but he no longer looks like he has murder on his mind. Mickey’s not comforted by any of this, if anything he’s more scared than ever. Rumlow definitely seems like the kind of psycho who smiles while he rips someone’s heart out of their chest.

“Don’t fuck this up,” Rumlow says finally. He smiles and pats Mickey just a shade lighter than a slap on the cheek. Then he elbows his way through the junior agents, who are all too frightened and preoccupied with trying to figure out how Mickey’s still alive.

***

That night, Mickey dreams of the night Terry caught him and Ian together. His mind skips the good parts, watching movies, fucking on the couch, in the kitchen, in the bedroom. He doesn’t get to relive the peace of waking up before Ian, watching him sleep for a while. 

His head aches with the memory of Terry’s fists raining down on him, the gun to his temple. When he wakes up, he’s gasping for breath, his hands up automatically to wipe the tears away before someone sees. But it’s pitch black in the room, and everyone’s still out cold. He looks at the clock next to his nightstand, sees it’s not even four in the morning. 

He lays back, feeling the uncomfortable sensation of sweat beginning to cool around the ring of his collar, under his armpits, and the small of his back. He hates that fucking dream, because he hates anything that makes him think about his father. And because it reminds him of the look on Ian’s face when Svetlana was riding him. The fear and the pain and the disgust. 

It wasn’t until that day that Mickey realized how special it had been that Ian had never looked at him like that before. A lot of people thought Mickey was disgusting, and for the most part, it was because he wanted it that way. But not Ian. Ian looked at him like he was something special, like he was worth looking at. Having it taken away hurt more than the pistol-whipping. 

Sleep doesn’t come back quickly, but when it does it’s at least dream-free. 

***

Later that night, on the way to their drop-off point for the mission, Mickey’s finally shaking off the funk of his previous night’s dream. He was lucky enough not to be sorted into Rumlow’s vehicle, and Dumb and Dumber, two of his teammates, are cracking him up on the journey, not that he’ll ever admit it.

“No, but like, shit  _ has  _ to get on your dick if you put it in someone’s ass.”

“You idiot, why would anyone fuckin’  _ do it  _ that way then? That’s fuckin’ gross.”

“That’s what I’m sayin’! It’s unnatural or some shit.”

Kima and her team are riding in the same van, and the others in her group are practically members of Mensa compared to Mickey’s cohorts. They can’t keep their laughter in check. Kima makes eye contact with Mickey and lifts an eyebrow suggestively.

“You don’t wanna weigh in, Milkovich?” she asks innocently.

Mickey’s grateful for the dim lighting because he can feel his cheeks start to heat up. How the fuck did she figure that shit out? Then he remembers her calling him out for saying Ian’s name, and remembers she’s smart enough to put two and two together to come up with four.

The two idiots on his team stare back and forth between him and Kima, clear that they missed something, but miles away from figuring out what it is.

“Nah,” Mickey says. 

The guys look at him with opened mouths. After a few seconds, one of them looks back at Kima. “You sayin’ Milkovich fucks people in the ass or somethin’?”

“Or something,” she says. Mickey glares at her, but his teammates still look like they haven’t got a clue. The others in the van are snickering, though, but Mickey can’t deal with that now.

Just in time, the van comes to a stop at the end of a dock. They’re surrounded by warehouses, no lights except for those coming off a few boats far out into the water. The van door opens and they all pile out, moving silently towards the back of the warehouse. Kima’s team peels off to go to another entrance around the side that they’ll have to scale up the second story to get to. Mickey’s team follows him to a steel door, covered with a thick chain and an industrial-strength padlock.

Mickey thinks for a second of how he’d handle such a predicament back in the South Side. His lock-picking skills were nothing to scoff at, but even he might have been defeated by something that looked so expensive. Now, he simply wraps his hand around it and pulls. The metal creaks and the shackle pulls free of the case with almost no effort at all. Mickey has a feeling that shit is never going to get old.

The group of them make their way quietly into the first floor of the warehouse, turning down a narrow hallway towards the front of the building. According to Rumlow, there’s an anteroom that should be filled with guards. Mickey and his team’s job is to neutralize all of them, preferably without deadly force. SHIELD wants to bring anyone left standing in for debriefing after the mission is complete.

There’s the faintest hint of light from under the door when they reach their destination. Mickey can see shadows moving in the room, but there’s no sound of talking. There could be between six and ten men behind the door, and there’s only four junior agents assigned to the takedown. For some reason, Mickey doesn’t feel nervous about the odds.

He puts his hand on the door handle and tests it a fraction of a pull. It doesn’t budge, and he’s guessing there’s a deadbolt or two in place. He tries to calculate how much of his back he’ll have to put into this and thinks he’s got it. He turns back to his team and holds up the fingers of his free hand, counting down from three. They’re all watching him intently, and by the time he rips the door entirely off its hinges, they’re storming in and all hell has broken loose.

It’s a blur of fists and feet, none of them landing on Mickey at first. He moves closer to the second door at the back of the room, ignoring the shouts of the strange men losing the fight against his team. He’s in an advantageous position, crouched near the floor when the second door swings open to reveal four more men. 

He takes out the first one with a swipe of his leg and a punch to the throat. The second gets a vicious kick to the groin before he he grabs him by the forehead and knocks him back into the guy behind him, the pair of them stunned and disoriented. The last one catches him on his back leg, knocking him to the ground. 

They roll around on the concrete floor, both of them trying to land punches as they go. Mickey gets one in on the side of the guy’s chest, then gets the breath knocked out of him when he feels a fist in his stomach. Somehow he gets on top, straddling the guy’s hips. The guy gets a hand around his throat, his arms much longer than Mickey’s. 

It draws up a deep-seated well of rage inside Mickey, remembering the last time someone’s hand was in the same place. He ignores the gradual cutting off of his air supply, he doesn’t need as much of it as he used to. Instead he focuses on getting his hands around the guy’s head and pulling him up off the ground. With all of his strength, he slams his head down onto the concrete. The hand slips off his throat, but tries to come back up to get a new grip. Mickey doesn’t give him the chance, bringing his head down again and again onto the concrete, until he starts to see a pool of liquid forming underneath.

Mickey doesn’t stop until someone’s pulling him to his feet, shouting his name. He whirls around, fists raised and bloody from where they were scraping against the floor. It’s one of his teammates, Tim, and he looks almost frightened of Mickey. Mickey shakes his head to try and clear his thoughts.

“You okay, man?”

“I’m fine,” Mickey croaks. He stares down at the guy on the floor, grateful to hear him moaning quietly. He’s not dead, though the idea that he’ll be able to give SHIELD any useful information after that kind of beating is wishful thinking. 

“Where are the others?” Mickey asks. Tim points into the room the injured guy came out of. He hadn’t even noticed the B team go by, he was too busy trying to paint the floor with the guy’s brains. Mickey follows Tim into the room, where Kima and the others are grabbing black cases, opening them, and replacing them with the vials from their vests.

Mickey sees that the vials look similar to the one he pulled out of the lab, but doesn’t know how the two missions are connected. He thought they were here for some kind of drug trafficking interception, marking the dealer’s supply with a tracking sticker so SHIELD could keep an eye on the distribution.

After less than a minute, Kima and her team finish whatever they were doing and put the cases back where they found them. “Let’s go,” Kima says, and they all follow her out.

If everyone did their job correctly, there should be no obstacles on their way out of the warehouse. And walking through the main room, it seems like that’s the case. They’re a few yards from the exit, when there’s a quiet rush of air from above them, and they all look up to see what’s coming.

In the dark, it’s almost impossible to make out the shape of a man. He hits the ground in the center of them all, and starts taking them out before half of them can even react. Kima goes flying across the room with a kick to the chest. Mickey can hear her land among some crates. Two more agents go down before Mickey can even see what happened. He tries to focus on the man who’s kicking their asses, to identify some kind of weak spot. He notices that he’s got black paint around his eyes, wearing a mask on the lower half of his face, and that one of his arms is covered in something shiny just as a boot connects with his thigh.

He crashes to his knees and looks up, expecting the man to be right there to take him out. But Kima’s back and latched herself onto their attacker, trying to get her hands on a vulnerable part of his face. 

Mickey stands back up and joins Tim in front of the man, tag-teaming him with kicks and punches that do practically nothing to stop him from trying to get rid of Kima. He eventually shakes her off, throwing her even more violently than before, but taking his mask with it. Mickey doesn’t even have a second to look at his face before Tim pulls out a taser and discharges it against the man’s arm, the shiny one. When the probes hit the arm and light up, he can see that the guy’s actual arm is made entirely of metal, from his shoulder to his hand. The taser doesn’t have any effect other than annoying him. He pulls off the probes and punches Tim so hard in the jaw, he’s unconscious before he even hits the ground.

The only person left standing is Mickey and he backs up, pulling his fists up in front of him, trying to figure out which weapon to pull that would actually do something other than piss the guy off. The man steps closer to him into a small shaft of light, for the first time revealing a glimpse of his features.

Mickey notices a shock of red hair first, messy waves damp with sweat. Then his eyes flick down and he can’t even breathe. This guy, whoever he is, is wearing Ian’s face.

“Ian?” he hears himself say, his voice small and weak, utterly shocked. It can’t be.

The man moves forward quickly, his hand slicing the air in front of him, aiming for Mickey’s face. At the last second, Mickey dodges and brings his arms up to block, wincing when he gets a powerful fist in the forearm. It feels like the bone cracks on impact. But he pushes through, dancing backwards and sending out a kick of his own, connecting with the man’s--Ian’s?--stomach.

The resemblance is too close to be anyone but Ian. His skin is so pale, it’s practically glowing, and Mickey can see the strong jaw he found himself admiring in the rare moments he could just  _ look _ at Ian.

“Ian, is that you? What are you doing here?”

The man stops in front of him, looking confused and angry because of his confusion. “Who the hell is Ian?”

Mickey’s trying to come up with an answer to that question when a fist catches him right in the cheek, and he’s gone.

***

The soldier has to be dragged down to the cryo room. He doesn’t struggle, but he doesn’t help either. He’s not catatonic, but he’s close. The men responsible for getting him in the chair have never seen him react like this to a mission. He almost looks like he’s thinking.

He doesn’t put up a fight when they sit him in the chair, but he doesn’t immediately lay back and assume the position. The men look at one another, confused. Should they push him back? Strap him in before the doctor arrives? It’s not normal protocol, to handle him in such a way.

Before any of them can react, the men in charge arrive, including the doctor.

“What is he doing? Why isn’t he strapped down?” the doctor snaps.

The guards snap into action immediately, attempt to push him back to recline. The soldier comes out of his daze, his eyes snapping into focus. With his left arm, the weapon, he lifts one of the men completely off the ground, throwing him effortlessly into two others, sending them all crashing into lab equipment. Two more come at him, and again it takes very little energy to bat them away, knocking them unconscious. 

“Enough!” The man in charge of it all approaches him, fury written all over his face. The soldier feels afraid, even if he isn’t sure why. “Cooperate, or you know what happens.”

He doesn’t know, not exactly, except that it will hurt. He sits back, staring at the men who are still upright.

“I knew him,” he says. “Who was he?” He’s asking himself as much as he’s asking the men in the room. He’s never remembered anyone before, not even the doctor who administers his treatment. Not even the man in the suit, the man who frightens him. So why does he remember the man in the warehouse? The one with the blue eyes?

“You don’t remember anyone,” the man tells him, nodding to the guards behind the chair. They pull the soldier’s shoulders down so the doctor’s aides can strap him down.

“But I knew him,” he says, again. He feels a memory trying to surface, a scared, sad young man, looking at him with those sad, blue eyes like he has all the answers. There’s sunlight behind him, wherever they are. And he’s talking, but the soldier can’t make out what he’s saying, he’s speaking too quietly. “I knew him,” he repeats, whispering.

The doctor puts the bite guard in his mouth, and he closes his lips around it obediently. Two electrode pieces are pushed against his temples, and he braces for the pain. He closes his eyes before it comes, trying to cling to the first fragments of memory he’s ever experienced.

  
The machine wipes them away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's lots of action-movie-type violence in this one. People getting beat up, shot, etc.
> 
> Also, thanks for reading and commenting! It really means a lot. 
> 
> As always, come talk to me on Tumblr at onlysmallfic.


	4. The kind you stop

After he gets the machine, the soldier doesn't remember the arm. It's a shock, when he notices it. But then he has the sense that it has shocked him before. That isn't right, he's not meant to remember. 

The arm is the first thing that comes back. He suspects it always is. 

When they put him to sleep, he remembers.

He remembers yelling. Papers, somebody telling him about proof. A fraud. Guilt, anger, and something else, all swirling inside him. He thinks they may have done something to his brain, even before the arm. The memories are frantic, too fast, spinning out and away before he can grasp them. 

He's on the tarmac, looking at all the different vehicles. There are humvees, jeeps. The helicopter. When he sees it he knows it's the one. He has to fly it, that'll fix everything. 

He's in the cockpit, staring at the controls. They look so friendly, like a video game at the arcade. He can do this. 

He's pressing buttons, flipping switches. What he wants to happen isn't happening. He should be in the air, it just feels right. There’s gotta be some way, he just needs to get  _ up _ . 

He stands, leans out the door, looks up at the blades. They’re not moving, they’re supposed to be moving. Maybe they just need a push. Mashing more buttons, he hears something engage, but he's still thinking that it just needs a push. His mind catches on the word. Push, push, push. Stands up again, puts his hand up. 

It’s so fast. There’s blood. Then faces standing over him. Screaming, but he doesn’t know who’s screaming. The sky is so beautiful. The ground beneath his head is uncomfortable, pebbles and gravel digging into his scalp, but that’s the closest thing to pain. 

Things go black for a while. He hears the screaming. He wishes somebody would just make it stop. It would all be okay if they would just stop screaming.

He’s in a room, it’s a really white room. He’s never been there before, so he thinks maybe it’s where the doctors are. He doesn’t get hurt, he’s always so careful. Doesn’t get sick either, immune from so many years of going without antibiotics, even over-the-counter shit. They couldn’t afford it.

He doesn’t remember who they are.

The screaming is gone, it’s quiet. There are machines making gentle noises, beeps that are pleasant and strange. He’s sort of floaty, definitely lighter than before.

Someone notices he’s awake. They pick up a phone on the wall and the talking is too low for him to make out. They stare at him until two men arrive.

There’s a man in a nice suit. The man reminds him of someone else, but he can’t place who. He’s too tired. The man is older, handsome, he has really pretty eyes. The man laughs and he thinks maybe he said that out loud.

He can’t remember the words, they don’t stick. But at one point, he looks down, where his arm is supposed to be. But it’s not there. Maybe it’s under the covers but then he moves his shoulder and he feels this pressure that could turn into pain, but it won’t. But nothing moves, there’s nothing connected to it and the screaming starts again.

The man can fix it. And they can fix his head, too, although he doesn’t know what that means. The paperwork, the ID, they don’t matter anymore. He’s not in trouble. Was he in trouble? Doesn’t matter, because he won’t be now. Because he’s going to do what they say. 

He’ll have his arm back. He’ll be all better. His head won’t be so loud maybe. 

He always wanted to be a good soldier. The best. Now he’ll be perfect, the perfect soldier. 

He says yes. He says it over and over and over. Yes, yes, yes. 

That’s how he gets the arm. The metal one. They didn’t tell him it wouldn’t be his arm, not exactly. Or maybe they did. He’s not sure. But they tell him this one is better. He’s going to be so strong now. He’ll change the world. Save it. He’ll do things no man was ever able to do before or since. Everyone will be safe. All the bad people? He’ll take care of them. One by one. Sometimes all at once.

And all those things he doesn’t want to think about, doesn’t want to remember? All the lies he told, that became so difficult to keep track of, with his head spinning? He won’t ever think of them again. They’ll be gone, disappeared into the air like smoke. 

All that will be left is a hero. He’s going to be a hero.

But they lied. Or maybe they didn’t know. Because sometimes things come back. And they have to keep taking them away. They get their reports, then they have to put him in the chair. Start over, when he asks questions.

But some things, they always come back.

The arm, how he got it. That comes back. Not all the way, but just enough. Enough to make him ask questions.

They usually wipe it all away once they realize he remembers how he got the arm. When he starts asking questions. They take it all away again, but all maybe isn’t right. Because every time they do it, there’s a little more to take. But it must be impossible to get everything.

He doesn’t say anything, not this time. He remembers the arm and how it got there. He’s quiet.

Then he remembers blue eyes. They are so blue. 

Maybe this time, they’ll let him remember.

***

Mickey feels the concrete underneath him, the hard scratch of brick behind his back. The bottle of whiskey in his hand is as cheap as they come, and doing God’s work making him forget the fact that he got a hooker pregnant and his father is forcing them to get married. He can barely remember his own name, let alone the fucking nightmare his life has become.

Then Ian walks in, yelling at him as usual. Mickey’s not listening, there’s a really nice rush in his head that turns all of Ian’s words into just noise. He knows his face isn’t giving it away, but when Ian walks away from him, he’s checking out his ass, wondering why he never bothered to fuck Ian even once. Then he remembers how good it was to have Ian fuck him. That’s why. Nothing could ever beat that.

The vodka bottle shattering across the floor cuts through the static in his head and brings him back to reality, even if it’s still blurred around the edges.

They’re outside without him realizing how they got there. What Ian’s saying only half-reaches him. He hears “fag” and “gay” and not much else. He can tell by the way Ian’s looking at him that he expects Mickey to do something. All it does is make the bile climb in his throat, rage and shame knocking together, his fists are swinging without him really thinking about it. 

Something about Ian on the ground, blood on his face, struggling to get a good breath, it makes Mickey feel calm. That’s how he feels on the inside: bloody, bruised, kicked in the stomach by people who should have protected him, or at least given half a fuck about him. 

He knows he’s crying, like a little, fucking bitch, really. But he can’t figure out why. Why does he do anything? Why does anybody do anything? None of it matters. He doesn’t have any control over his life, why can’t Ian see that? 

He walks away, spouting bullshit, he doesn’t even know what he’s saying. But he doesn’t have to to know he’s cutting Ian deep. Maybe the fucking idiot will finally learn his lesson and stay the fuck away from Mickey for good. That gives him some shot at happiness, miniscule as it is. 

Ian’s meant for better things, much better things than Mickey. Everybody knows it.

***

Mickey wakes up gasping. He wipes his face and his hand comes away wet. His knuckles hurt, but he doesn’t see any cuts or bruises. 

He looks around and see that he’s the last of the team to regain consciousness. He feels the groggy effects of SHIELD-issue painkillers, more powerful than he’s ever been given before. He doesn’t know why, but he suspects they were keeping him out for a reason beyond giving his body time to heal.

The med bay is filled with the rest of his team, except for a few that are missing. He hopes that means they escaped the fight unscathed, and not because they’re dead. That metal arm could have done some serious fucking damage.

It’s the thought of that arm that knocks loose the final tendrils of the drugs in his system. That metal arm was attached to Ian. 

Mickey sits up in his hospital bed and yanks an IV out of his hand, plus a trio of monitors tracking his vitals, which sets off shrieking alarms. Mickey ignores them and the yelling of his nearby teammates, who start screaming at him to get back in bed. He moves toward the door with a purpose, ignoring the way the hospital gown he’s wearing feels breezy from the back. 

Just as he pushes open the double doors to enter the hallway, he’s stopped by Agent Hill and Rumlow on the other side.

“Mickey, you’re meant to be in recovery,” Hill says, sounding stern but also concerned. She takes him by his upper arm and tries to lead him back towards his bed, but he knocks her hand away.

“Fuck you! Did you know he was going to be there?” Mickey moves closer to her, steps right up into her face, hoping he looks as furious as he feels. There’s no fucking way they didn’t know about Ian. “Tell me!”

Rumlow grabs both his wrists and yanks him back away from Hill, twisting his arms painfully. Mickey barely feels it, immediately putting up a struggle against the bigger man’s iron grip. Mickey kicks back and connects with Rumlow’s shin, which earns him a shout and a string of curses, in addition to a looser grip. Mickey rips his hands out of Rumlow’s grasp and gets back in Hill’s face.

“What did they do to him? If you know, I’ll fucking kill you! I’ll kill everyone in this fucking place!” He lifts his arms to go for Hill, not even sure what his next move is, only that someone here is responsible for the way Ian is now. Whoever it is, he wants to see their blood.

Before he can get to Hill, Rumlow stops him again. This time, it’s with a taser, and Mickey knows an unbelievable amount of pain before his body goes rigid and his vision completely blacks out.

***

This time, when he wakes up, he’s in a much smaller room, and he’s strapped to the bed. There’s a mesh vest and thick straps tying him to the rails on the side of the bed. He tests to see if he can sit up, but he can only lift a few inches up off the bed. It’s made of some stronger material than your standard-issue psych ward shit. He’d seen his dad tear through that once. 

There’s a fresh IV in his hand, and he looks up to see if he can figure out what it is. It’s clear, but there’s no writing on the bag. Whatever it is, he feels slow and thinks it has little to do with the tasing he received. 

A nurse comes into the room a few minutes later, looking down at a chart. She goes right to the monitors by his bed without looking at him, making notes.

“Ay,” he says, and she jumps. She drops the chart and clutches her hands to her chest. “Jesus, don’t have a heart attack,” he says. 

“You’re awake,” she says, gritting her teeth and looking annoyed, mostly to have been so surprised. 

“No shit,” he says, raising his eyebrows. He pulls on the restraints. “What’s with the fuckin’ Joker treatment?”

“Precautions,” she says, picking up her chart and going back to taking notes.

“Kinda extreme,” he says, trying to see what she’s writing. She turns her chart further out of his line of sight and then stands up straight.

“You tried to attack Agent Hill.”

“I did not.” He did, obviously, but he knows she would have shut his ass down before he did any real damage. He’s not even sure Hill is--what’s the word they use for it?--enhanced? But she’s still bigger than him and smarter than him.  He knows that much.

“And you assaulted Agent Rumlow.”

“Well, he fuckin’ deserved it.” 

The nurse huffs at him and makes one more note in her chart. She doesn’t exactly look like she would argue with him about that point. Rumlow’s a sadistic prick to pretty much everyone. 

She snaps her pen into place and turns to leave the room.

“Hey! Wait, how do I get outta here?” he yells. She turns back to him and shrugs before leaving the room and closing the door behind her. “Fuck!” 

After the door shuts, Mickey starts to feel like the vest is cutting off his air. His breath is coming in gasps, not feeling like it really reaches his lungs at all. He can feel sweat starting to form along his hairline, and his stomach starts to churn with nausea. He looks around to see if there’s a button he can push to call for help, but there’s nothing in his reach. 

He lays back and stares at the ceiling, trying to calm himself down. They won’t let him out of there unless he does, he’s willing to bet. But he couldn’t help being angry about the situation. They knew about Ian, they had to. It all makes sense to him now, why he was recruited in the first place. He thought it had nothing to do with Ian, but obviously it had everything to do with him.

He tries to picture Ian in the warehouse, but it was so dark. There were only a few seconds where he could actually see him, and what he could see hadn’t been pretty. Ian looked so hard, but lost at the same time. His hair was too long, badly in need of a cut. He looked bigger, like he’d been juiced with something even stronger than what they’d given Mickey. 

It was his eyes that Mickey couldn’t forget. They were Ian’s, but they weren’t  _ right _ . He couldn’t shake that first thought he’d had when he realized it was Ian. That he had been looking at a stranger wearing Ian’s face.

Mickey has so many questions. How did Ian end up there? Did it have something to do with the special program Mandy mentioned? And what the fuck was up with the metal arm? Maybe it was some kind of experimental weapon. Mickey had seen plenty of things during his time at SHIELD that looked like they were straight out of a James Bond movie. It must be something like that.

His chest starts to tighten up again when he thinks about the way Ian looked at him. He didn’t even know his own name. Mickey feels the burn of tears starting at the back of his eyes. He realizes he’s fucking scared, scared for Ian and for himself. 

“What the fuck did they do to you?” he whispers.

***

It’s hours before they let Mickey out of the restraints. They don’t let him leave the room right away, but they do give him a hot meal, and take the IV out of his arm. A doctor comes in to look him over, check on the fracture to his arm from where Ian punched him. It’s eighty-percent healed, which means he’s mission-approved. It hurts a bit, but it’ll do. His mental state is another story. They’re not going to let his behavior in the med bay fly without some kind of punishment.

An agent escorts Mickey to a meeting room. Agent Hill is there, along with two other men, one he recognizes and one he doesn’t. The first is the guy who reminded him of a school guidance counselor, the kind of average-looking, middle-aged, white guy. Mickey thinks briefly that he looks like he could be SHIELD’s accountant. The other guy looks more the way he would imagine someone who works for a top secret military organization to look. He’s huge, Mickey can see that even though he’s sitting down. His head is shaved down to his dark scalp, and he has an eye patch over one eye. It’s a little bit ridiculous, but he doesn’t look like someone who would take too kindly to being laughed at.

“Sit down, Mickey,” the white guy tells him, giving him a smile. He motions to the chair next to Agent Hill. “I’m Agent Coulson, this is Director Fury.” Mickey looks over at the other guy, trying to process that the badass dude in leather is basically in charge of everything. 

He tries to read Agent Hill, who is inscrutable as always. At least she doesn’t look too pissed about the fact that he tried to take her head off not even twelve hours earlier. If it had been Rumlow sitting there, he’s not sure he’d still have a face.

All three of them have a file in front of them. Hill’s is open to a report, the details of which he can’t really make out. From the few words he can see, it looks like something to do with last night. Across the table, Coulson and Fury are looking at photos. 

“After what happened this morning, we thought it was probably a good idea to sit down with you, go over a few things,” Coulson says. His tone gets Mickey’s blood rising.

“A few fuckin’ things? Really?” He’s not in the mood to play games with these people. He wants a straight fucking answer about Ian, not a bunch of administrative bullshit.

Hill gives him a slightly exasperated look, but doesn’t engage. Coulson just gives him a little smile.

“I understand that you encountered something during your mission last night that left you,” Coulson looks up, trying to find the right word. “Upset?”

Mickey feels his eyes nearly bug out of his head. “Upset?”

Again, Coulson cracks a smile, not phased in the slightest by Mickey’s anger. “Yes. Can you tell us why?”

“You know why! This is fuckin’ bullshit!” Mickey slams his fist onto the table. “Don’t fuckin’ play me. You knew exactly what we were going to find there.  _ Who  _ was going to be waiting for us.”

Hill shakes her head. “We suspected, but we didn’t know for sure.” Mickey glares at her. 

“Yeah? Thanks for the fuckin’ heads up then.”

Coulson clears his throat and flips a page in his report. He trails his finger down the paper until he comes to a particular line. “In our debrief with your teammate, Kima James, she told us that you spoke to one of the operatives at the warehouse. Her take on it was that you might know him.”

Mickey stares at Coulson. He’s breathing hard, seeing red around the edges of his vision. Fuck these people and their fucking games. He stands up, his chair toppling over behind him. Again, no one reacts and that makes him even angrier somehow.

He leans over the table towards Coulson and Fury, looking back and forth between the two of them. Coulson looks mildly concerned, and Fury regards Mickey as if he just picked up the wrong fork at a fancy dinner. Neither of them give a fuck that his--that  _ Ian  _ is out there, that something happened to him. 

“Fuck. You.” He turns to leave the room. The door is locked and no matter how much strength he puts behind it, it won’t budge. Figures they’d have reinforced shit to withstand the freaks they create. Mickey looks at his reflection in the glass next to the door. He can see now that though it feels like rage running through him, in actual fact he just looks terrified. Behind him, Coulson, Fury, and Hill are all turned to face him, watching him passively, almost bored. 

When he punches the glass it splinters a bit, but doesn’t come close to breaking. He closes his eyes, tries to breathe through the pain. His head feels a little clearer.

There’s a few seconds of silence before Fury speaks. “If you’re done, maybe you’d like to sit down. Give us a chance to tell you something about your,” he pauses, regarding Mickey carefully. “Friend.”

Mickey turns and stares at Fury, who looks back at him with something like honesty. Mickey knows from that look that they’re only going to tell him what benefits them. But at this point, he’ll take knowing that.

Hill rights his chair for him and then pushes hers back a bit, giving him some more room. He feels a little bit of embarrassment creeping in, but then pushes it down. He reminds himself that these assholes knew something about Ian all this time and didn’t say anything. He’s allowed to break a little glass.

He sits down and Fury gives him the tiniest of nods. “There have been some assassinations recently. Mostly politically motivated,” Coulson says. He flips back to the front of his file, turns it around to face Mickey. There are some newspaper clippings. His vision is blurred with anger, but he can see a handful of headlines about dead mayors, councilmen and women. None of it means anything to him.

“We’ve been keeping our eye on the situation, but it’s not exactly our jurisdiction unless someone makes it. But there’s been some intelligence recently that the person carrying out the assassinations is connected to a group called Hydra, which is very much our business.”

“The fuck is Hydra?” If Mickey didn’t already feel like he was living in a comic book, the stupid names alone would get him there.

Coulson pulls the file back and closes it. “Essentially, Hydra is a terrorist organization. In our records, they can be traced as far back to Nazi Germany. But some people think their origins go back as much as a thousand years.” Noticing Mickey’s confused look, Coulson sighs. “They want to take over the world, Mickey. And they only want certain people to be living on it when they do.”

“For more than half a century, SHIELD has been trying to take them out. We’ve developed dozens of programs to curtail their progress, including the one you belong to,” Fury says. 

“So what the fuck are they still around for then?” Mickey asks. 

Fury smiles grimly. “Cut off one head, two more grow back in its place.”

Coulson nods. “Their most recent head seems to be one you recognize.”

Mickey lets that sink in for a moment, then he’s shaking his head. “Ian part of Hydra? No,” Mickey says. Ian was  _ good _ . Ian wanted to save the world, not destroy it. “No fuckin’ way. Ian’s a fuckin’ boy scout. Rescuing kittens out of trees and shit. He wouldn’t do something that would hurt anybody. Not like this.”

“We don’t think he has a choice,” Hill says. Mickey looks at her, all the fear his punch to the window had dissipated rushing back with full force. “Hydra has extremely advanced mind control technology.”

“That’s why we brought you in here, Mickey. We need you to tell us everything happened last night. Help us assess how far gone he is.” Coulson gives him an encouraging look.

“It happened so fast. I didn’t even know it was him right away.” Mickey thinks back, feeling sick when he thinks about the fact that he was trying to hurt Ian, could have killed him and not even realized it. 

“Did he recognize you?” Hill asks.

Mickey’s shaking his head no before he even answers. “I don’t know. I said his name, but he didn’t know it,” Mickey says. The sick feeling only gets worse when he thinks about where Ian must be at this moment. He’s with terrorists, who brainwashed him. “We gotta go fuckin--get him, or something. Why are we just sitting here?”

“It’s not that simple,” Hill says. 

“Why not? How’d they even get him? He was yours, wasn’t he?” No one answers, but Hill and Coulson’s expressions tell him enough. “So go fucking get him! That’s your fuckin’ job!”

They all stare at him, and now he sees their expressions for what they really are. Pity.

“You don’t want him back. Do you?”

***

There isn’t much to say after the three of them lay out for Mickey how unsuccessful past efforts have been to reverse the effects of Hydra’s mind control. Ian isn’t the first, but they’re hoping he’s the last, blah blah blah. Fucking bullshit. 

He’s laying in the dorm, which is eerily empty. He heard Coulson and Hill discussing some mission happening that night. Whatever it is, they didn’t want him to be a part of it. He knows his head wouldn’t be in it anyway. Probably get killed, too busy thinking about Ian.

The door opening surprises him. Kima walks in, looking like she wasn’t expecting him either. She takes a seat on her bed, which isn’t too far away from his. 

“What’d they do to you?” she asks.

Mickey shakes his head. There’s too much and not enough for him to say that could answer that questions.

Kima turns on one of the TVs overhead and Mickey is extremely grateful. He doesn’t want to talk about what happened at the debrief, or the night before. He knows he should get some sleep, he’s physically and emotionally exhausted from the roller coaster of fear and anger and anxiety he’s been riding since he saw Ian’s face. 

He’s only half-listening, but he hears the news broadcast reporting on an outbreak of the flu in South Boston. 

_ “Eight people are dead after a particularly nasty strain of flu hit one of Boston’s poorest neighborhoods. According to hospital officials, twenty-three more people are in critical condition at Mass General. Two homeless shelters and a nearby methadone clinic have been closed until they can be cleared by the Center for Disease Control. _

_ The CDC has advised those who experience severe headache and fever to stay home, wash your hands, and avoid contact with others, as this strain seems to spread very quickly.” _

The bad news is almost soothing, it sounds so much like normal life. He closes his eyes and listens to the reporter drag on about sneezing into your elbow and staying home from work when you don’t feel good. What a fuckin’ joke. As if people in the shitty neighborhoods could afford to miss a day of work.

The TV goes off without warning. Mickey sits up to look at Kima, who’s holding the remote and watching him carefully.

“What?” he says.

“The guy last night,” Kima starts. She looks down at her hands. “You knew him?”

Mickey feels his throat tighten up a bit. For a few minutes, he wasn’t thinking about Ian. He feels a wave of guilt wash over him. He should be thinking about only Ian, how to get him back.

“Yeah,” he says, gruffly. 

She nods. “Who is he?” 

Mickey narrows his eyes. “Nobody you fuckin’ know.”

She pokes the inside of her cheek with her tongue, thinking. “Who is he to you?”

Mickey’s face goes hot immediately. He doesn’t want to have this conversation with anyone. Hill, Coulson, and Fury, they all seemed to know exactly who Ian was to Mickey. They probably knew before they recruited him. Or maybe that was why they got to him in the first place. 

He’s still thinking about how to answer, when Kima interrupts his thoughts. “Some people can’t be saved. They said that in training. Some of it was bullshit, but some of was true.”

He looks at her. He’s torn between wanting to put his fist through her face and begging her to take it back. If she  _ knew  _ Ian, she’d know he was worth saving. He was probably the only one. 

Kima says gently, “There’s the kind you save, and then there’s the kind you stop.”

Mickey shakes his head. He feels like crying, for what seems like the millionth time that day.

  
“I know which one he is,” he says. His voice sounds shaky, even to his own ears. But he believes what he’s saying, without knowing why or how. It’s enough that it’s Ian they’re talking about. “He’s not the kind you fuckin’ stop.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy, trying to introduce some other major Marvel Cinematic Universe people here... And finally, Ian gets a POV! This is terrifying!
> 
> As always, comments and kudos keep me going. How'm I doing? Does any of this make sense at all? :)
> 
> Tell me on tumblr at onlysmallfic.

**Author's Note:**

> I told myself I wasn't going to start posting until I had the whole thing done. But I couldn't wait. Will likely post every two weeks. But maybe faster if I get it done sooner. :)
> 
> Posting the first two at once, though, just to get a bit more into the Captain America-ness of the story.
> 
> I live for comments and feedback. 
> 
> On tumblr, reblogging a ton of Stucky (Steve/Bucky) as onlysmallfic.


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